The Old Grey Thinker | Substack
The Old Grey Thinker
Retired Master Mariner. Fifty years telling ships where to go. Writing about retirement, ageing, and the strange experience of becoming invisible. One essay drew 98,000 readers because people kept sending it to someone who needed it. Tea mandatory.
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Everyone Warned Me I Might Lose My Mind in Retirement. Nobody Warned Me I Might Wish I Had.
A man stopped me at the harbour last week.
He'd been reading the newsletter for three months. Recognised me, he said, from the photo. He's sixty-three. Still working. Counting months.
He asked if it was as hard as I write about.
I said: some of it is harder. Some of it is much better than I expected. The hard part is that nobody told me which would be which.
He nodded. He's got the look of someone who's been doing the maths for two years.
I told him the first three months are the strangest. After th…
Retirement doesn't make you lonely.
It reveals the loneliness that was already there.
I had company for forty years. Conversation. Noise. The constant reassuring presence of people nearby.
What I didn't always have was connection.
It took retirement to notice the difference.